Heat
by corellian-smuggler
Summary: Stranded with Han on a desert island, Leia's desire gets the best of her.


**The lovely Erin Darroch asked me to write about skinny dipping. This story is just a fanciful continuation of the hilarious conversion she started :) Obviously, AU!**

xxx

She was losing her mind.

Leia was sure of it. The worst part was she didn't even think she could blame it on the circumstances, but oh, she'd use any excuse she could if it came down to it. After all, being stranded for a week on a desert island—in the blistering heat, with little food and water, and increasingly low chances of rescue... Leia could reason that it was understandable to have a few lapses in judgment or sanity. Expected even.

' _Oh? And is nightly skinny dipping with scoundrels to be 'expected,' too?'_ she asked herself in exasperation. _'Oh, yes, Organa. Written into official Alliance survival guides, is it? Basic training for field operatives? Right after how to procure drinking water and build a shelter? Beware of heat stroke. Beware of dehydration. Beware of sudden urges to get naked with your companion.'_

Leia shook her head at her own recklessness.

The fact of the matter was that she and Han had been stranded for all of eight days. Leia's comm had died on the third day. They'd turned on Han's—dead on the seventh. They'd eaten their ration bars and their water was long gone. Two days prior she'd squeezed the precious last few drops of solarblock from the tube to dab onto her shoulders. With their comms dead they couldn't reach Chewie. They dared not turn on their emergency beacon—the Imperials would surely pick up the transmission and come to slaughter them on the beach. They couldn't send up a smoke signal or flare for the same reason—and, more dishearteningly, but they'd had to admit, it was likely the rebellion wasn't even looking for them. It would be suicide to send ships scouting over the planet's islands around their coordinates when the Empire knew that she and Han had fallen off the grid in the same vicinity.

And so they were good and stuck and the situation was dire. Undeniably fraught.

And yet for Leia it was fraught for entirely different reasons. What was wrong with her? They'd failed their mission objective, blown their cover, and were very likely to die in the middle of nowhere, and yet Leia's thoughts weren't on the rebellion or the data chip or the Imperials. Leia wasn't worrying about the war or even about their survival.

What was most troubling to Leia was that the eight days they'd been marooned on their little island had been the best eight days she'd had in two years. Sure, at first it had been tempestuous. Tensions had been running high and tempers were flaring hot. Both of them had been cranky with sun and thirst and hunger—their bickering plateauing at an astronomical level. Leia wasn't entirely sure when that had changed, when they'd gone from stress-arguing and worried silence to playing Little Island Homemaker, but they had.

Working together to build their sturdy shelter, exhausting and laborious but oh, something in the mutual straining of their bodies in joint effort, the satisfaction in the end result? Strong male fingers trailing bowed wood, hazel eyes appraising sheltering leaves and shady space below.

" _Not bad, Sweetheart, not bad. Hut-building an elective in princess school?"_

" _Castle-building, actually."_

" _Right."_

" _I had to improvise."_

"' _Course."_

None of that though had been as incendiary as sitting with him inside, sand cool and damp, out of the blistering sun. The close quarters—goddess it was all close. Sitting close. Sleeping close. Waking even closer...

Cocky smirk on his face, eyes bright with unabashed laughter, hunched in the sand at the base of the tree from which he'd fallen—slid. Slid like a child down a bannister, huge body—so precise and coordinated and agile—made clumsy and impractical by the bending, slender trunk. His dare. _"Alright, princess, think you can do better? Let's see it."_

Her exhilaration upon touching down in the sand shortly after had thrummed through her every vein, all the bacaonuts plucked from beneath the palm leaves high above had been waiting for her below. Her size for once had been an advantage over his tall frame and long limbs and big feet, and best of all was his delight. Not surly to have been bested but exultant in her success. His whoop of pride and glee as she'd tossed the first one down to him, huge grin when she'd scaled back to the ground. Playful nonchalance— _"Not bad, Highness"_ —made sweeter by discerning eyes, by obvious affection. His words as she had gone up, _"careful—I'm right below you."_ Somehow they hadn't been any condemnation of her ability—not a lack of confidence in her. He didn't expect her to slip. No, it was just the promise that he'd catch her. Always catch her.

Drinking the sweet water of the bacaonuts and eating the pink bacao flesh. Even in the sultry night air Leia shivered to recall how they'd sat in their little shelter, shoulder to shoulder despite the heat, passing one back and forth between them to take sweet drinks of the nourishing water within. The bacaonut water was delicious and refreshing and they'd drunk the first one in fast greedy gulps, but the second one had been slow. Sipping. Looking out at the sand and the waves, and somehow while passing their drink back and forth it had become easier instead for Han to keep hold of it, so when Leia had wanted to quench again her thirst he'd held it aloft for her, tilted it towards her lips, and as she drank she'd met his eyes over the bacaonut's rim.

That had been days and days ago, and yet remained their bacaonut routine. In the mornings finding another suitable tree, drinking and then eating the bacaonuts back at their hut. Foraging in the shallow water for shellfish—Han had even caught them a fish one night. And as the days had passed it wasn't that they spoke less of rescue or strategy or the Imperials or the mission. Rather it had begun to feel forced. Talk about a rescue because what else could they talk about? Talk about rescue because would it seem odd if they didn't? Expected, proper desert island etiquette—they had to discuss a rescue. If they didn't it might seem that they didn't want to be found...

And Leia was no fool. She did want to be found. She wanted to be rescued. They couldn't live forever on bacaonuts with only minimal shelter on a desert island, and she needed the cause like she needed to breathe—needed to return to base and keep fighting.

But it was becoming painfully apparent that breathing and the rebellion were far from her only needs.

Beside her in the starlight, Han shifted and turned over, and Leia squeezed her eyes shut even tighter against another powerful wave of want.

She probably could have endured the teamwork and fierce bonding, the closeness of sleeping in their tiny shelter side by side. She could have endured the staggering, unexpected eroticism of sharing the bacaonuts. More of a challenge had been the startling reality of being all the other had—how used they were to depending on each other during missions, and yet to find that without the other they would be utterly, terrifyingly alone? It felt like they were the only two beings on the entire planet, and that combination of extreme privacy and isolation, compounded by the unconventional domesticity, the inescapable intimacy of surviving together, depending on each other, having no one to talk to but each other and nothing to do but talk... that was harder to withstand. Harder still lying on the beach late at night with the sound of the ocean in their ears, pretending to look at the stars but covertly studying each other. Murmuring to him about her parents. Listening to him, for the first time in two years, share sparse gruff truth, modest shards of lonely childhood memory. His low, careful voice asking her if there had been beaches on Alderaan. Amazed when she'd said yes, said she'd swum in the Alda Sea. No beaches for little street kids, he'd muttered. Confessed with simultaneous dismissive bluster and old shame, how he couldn't swim until he was 16. Hazed, he said, at the imperial flight academy—pushed into a pool by the other cadets. How his SO had praised the older young men when Han had almost drowned. " _Pruning out the weak links."_ How Leia had listened in silence, absorbing his words. No longer stealing sidelong glances but turned to him, looking into his face.

" _Should'a known then,"_ he'd shrugged diffidently. _"Should'a known the Empire was no good. Guess I did know, maybe, but I didn't care."_

His gaze so intent on her. His whisper near her ear.

" _I hate that I was one of 'em, sweetheart."_

" _Everyone has a past,"_ she'd whispered back. _"Everyone makes mistakes. You left the Empire, Han. You did what was right, and you've made up for—"_

" _Flying back to Yavin doesn't change what I was."_

" _What were you?"_

His forehead resting against her own. Huff of a laugh bitter and regretful.

" _Imperial scum."_

Leia had glanced at his bloodstripes, faded with sun and seawater and covered in sand. He'd discarded shirt and vest in the heat and cut her leggings into shorts, but hadn't so much as looked at his bloodstripes with the vibroblade in his hand. Vibrant scarlet like purple in the silver night's light. Resolute. She looked at the scar that slashed his chin, rendered handsome face provocative, defiant, mysterious. Tried to picture his chin without it, how his eyes must have looked as he'd endured interrogation. Heard in her mind a cold male voice demand to know the location of the Wookiee slaves, imagined Han's insolent refusal to talk. Collision of steel fist against flesh and bone.

She'd looked down at where his hand held hers. Remembered the moment days prior when he'd switched their Y-wing shuttle into autopilot and grabbed her up from the copilots seat. His voice, " _We can't outrun 'em, Leia, this thing ain't fast enough."_ Grabbing their packs and grabbing her hand, thrusting them both towards the hatch, water racing past at dizzying speed below. Words branded into her.

" _We gotta jump!"_

" _Are you crazy!"_

" _Trust me!"_

She had. She did.

There on the sand as she had in the shuttle, Leia had squeezed Han's hand. Wondered if he could tell that he'd made her heart hurt, if he knew the man she saw when she looked at him.

" _You were never one of them, Han,"_ she'd whispered near to his lips. Felt him squeeze her hand in return.

Yes, that had been hard. So hard then, not to bare her soul to him. The words inside her that she tried not to hear: love him, want him, please. But Leia had withstood emotional moments with Han before and hadn't been consumed. Han had seen her in her weakest moments since Yavin. After nightmares, crying for Alderaan, gravely injured, sick with the flu.

He'd never seen her naked in the moonlight, though.

Until now.

How could she be so foolish?

Leia shifted in frustration in the sand. Far from soothing her, the sound of the ocean only seemed to add to the cacophony of memory and emotion in her head, and although for once there was a breeze coming in off the water, Leia felt hotter than she had on the hottest, most humid night on the island. Tendrils of her hair stuck to her temples and to the back of her neck, sand adhering to her sweaty skin. The little clothing she wore felt like far too much, and her pulse seemed to drive more heat from heart to extremities. She was positively on fire.

The first time she and Han had gone skinny dipping, it had been because of the stifling, suffocating heat. Even long after the sun had gone down, the two of them had been dripping sweat and miserable. The cool waves that had lapped just feet from their hut had been insurmountably tempting, and then the thought of sleeping the humid night in wet clothes had convinced them both to strip off at the water's edge. That first night Leia had made Han turn around until she'd gotten in the water. She'd remained submerged up to her neck, six feet away from him in the gentle waves. As the days had passed however they'd kept going back into the ocean, every night tentatively suggesting once more that they take another swim.

And every night they swam closer together. Leia had stolen glances—although she wasn't sure it was stealing, since Han was letting her look.

' _You can't,'_ she told herself desperately. _'You can't.'_

But she knew she would. Her restraint was wavering, her desire through the roof of their modest shelter and hovering somewhere up in the stars. Their time on the island had been confusing, and her feelings were getting the better of her. Leia was normally always reasonable, always reserved, always in control of her actions. She had to be, as a princess, senator, spy, commander. Her whole life had dictated that she be focused and rational. Strategic. Calculated. And all calculations indicated that loving a man who was planning to leave her would lead to a broken heart.

So why did she want to get naked with him in the water again?

"Leia?"

She went still.

"You still awake, princess?"

There was a long pause during which the breeze stirred the palm leaves overhead. She knew she should have stayed quiet and let him think she'd drifted off, knew that any other course of action would be dangerous. _'Don't do it, Organa!'_

Leia rolled over and looked up at him.

"Yes," she confirmed, immediately caught in the tractor beam pull of his gaze. "I can't sleep."

Han appeared profoundly relieved to hear that, propped as he was on one elbow beside her. She saw with her own eyes the way he visibly arrested his grin, persuaded blazing hope into casual shrug.

"Me neither," he agreed, eyes flickering from her face to her legs and to the water and back. This absurd circus every night, as though they didn't both know they'd go skinny dipping again. Han's knuckles seemingly accidentally brushed her arm. "You uh, are you hot?"

Hot. Leia could have shaken her head in disbelief. Hot? She was consumed. It was on and under her skin. In her flesh and pounding in her chest. The heat was throbbing between her legs. Couldn't he feel it coming off of her? Was he as hot as she was? Did he have any idea that she'd been lying there for hours thinking of bacaonut water running from the corners of his mouth and over his taut throat as he gulped? How she'd wanted to follow the trail of it with her lips and tongue? Did he not know that she was tormented by memories of his hands smoothing solarblock along her shoulders and arms, fingers working gently over the back of her neck? How she couldn't even look at him now without bursting into flame? Visions of his powerful body in the moonlight, his strong arms and broad chest, flat abdomen and lean hips—did he know that she was out of her mind with it? And he asked her if she was hot, as though she weren't so clearly burning? As though she hadn't spent every night contemplating how the drops of seawater that clung to his skin caught the stars' light, how his body looked beneath the light of the two moons overhead? As though she hadn't watched him walk, naked as the day he was born, to and from the water, face angled away but eyes riveted on him?

As though the night before they hadn't fallen asleep face to face, still wet from their dip, his arms around her? Voice still echoing in her ears: _"Cold, Sweetheart?"_ She'd been burning, but she'd said yes. Desperate for more heat, oh, more heat from him—please.

The way he'd whispered against her neck, _"You haven't had any nightmares since we've been here."_

Because of you, she'd wanted to say. Because I'm on fire for you. Because at night I dream of you.

Leia met his eyes and nodded into decision.

"Yes," she murmured. "I'm hot."

Han couldn't fake his nonchalance anymore, it seemed. His gaze bore into her so intensely that new embers bloomed in her belly. The teasing and playfulness of nights past had vanished—evaporated between them. The look they shared then seemed to speak to their mutual understanding. There would be no more awkward politeness, no more jokes, no lighthearted splashing or desperate pretense. They would not walk into the water like two friends desperate to cool off and uncomfortable with the circumstances, no affectionate jabs about "royal baths" or "careful princess, must be four feet deep over there—you'll have to tread water."

Not this time.

Han seemed to steel himself.

"Do you want to go for a swim?"

Leia nodded. Her heart was pounding in her ears as she accepted his outstretched hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. Had the water always been so very far from their hut? The walk like eternity to where the sand was wet and smooth? When they reached it Leia didn't pause or turn away, and though there was a sharp spike of nerves as she reached for the hem of her shirt, she didn't stop. Surely he'd seen her these last few nights, anyway? It seemed almost ludicrous to be shy.

Leia dropped her clothes to the sand and started into the water, limbs moving seemingly of their own volition. She felt out of control of herself. A specter by the sea—a woman in a trance. As the warm air touched her naked skin though, and as she felt the breeze once more on her bare chest, her back, her bare legs... Was it possible to be outside of herself and yet so hyperaware of her body at the same time? Only when she was waist-deep in the water did she turn to look at Han upon the shore, unsure of what she would see. His eyes trained on her moonlit figure, hungry and transfixed? Was he shedding his clothes as she had just done—had he begun yet to follow her? She bit her lip.

What Leia saw was Han with his back to her, his hands clasped behind his head, and his head tilted back towards the sky. She hadn't asked him not to look, but it seemed he'd turned anyway.

She suddenly found that her chest ached.

Leia sank into the water but did not turn. She watched openly as Han moved to face her and began to undress, his eyes boring into her from the shore. As he began to wade towards her Leia's mouth went dry—she'd long been fascinated with the way Han walked. His easy gate. How he carried himself. Equal parts cocky strut and inherent grace and agility. Mesmerizing, when she watched him. And now to see him move towards her—Leia had to avert her eyes. Maybe this was why Han hadn't looked when she'd entered the water: Leia couldn't breathe.

When he was before her Han ducked down so that he was in up to his neck, as she was. She hadn't waded in very deep but water that lapped her chest splashed only at his waist, and she'd submerged her shoulders in the mild waves. The two of them were still as they beheld one another, face to face in the water. As the waves rolled towards the shore Leia felt that the sea was pushing her towards Han, urging her closer.

"Better?" Han asked quietly, after several long moments of gazing at one another in electric silence. Leia had almost forgotten how to speak.

"Better?" she echoed.

Han nodded, still looking at her with that fierce longing.

"Said you were hot," he reminded her quietly. "Have you cooled off at all?"

Leia bit her lip, eyeing his bare shoulders, thinking of how much more nakedness there was beneath the water's surface—the strong thighs and smooth skin and everything else she'd seen as he'd walked through the waves. Leia had definitely not cooled off. The water _was_ cool, but rather than alleviating the inferno that afflicted her it seemed to have further inflamed her. The lack of clothes, the ocean breeze, the rhythmic ebb of the waves. Seeing the water rise and fall against Han's firm, tan body... She shook her head.

"Not yet," she confided.

And it dragged on, the silence, the gazing, the uncertainty. Stupid, she thought. They both knew what lay ahead. And yet it seemed that neither wanted to make the first move, that the whole thing was precarious. One misstep or one wrong assumption would send them careening towards disaster, towards argument or distance. To Leia it seemed that Han was afraid she'd startle if he moved too quickly, like he anticipated skittishness or indecision, or like he didn't dare show his hand lest he find he'd read her all wrong.

And Leia couldn't blame him for any of that, but she couldn't stand inaction either, as they bobbed together in the water, submerged to their necks in the sea. Eight days of it. No more.

Leia drew in a breath.

As Han watched she lifted her hands to her head and began to uncoil the knot she'd wound her hair into. In the heat she'd tied it up to keep it off her neck, but now she had a wild thought—she wanted to wet it, to feel it in the water. She wanted Han to see it, to know what it looked like unbound and unbraided. As she worked the long plait loose from the bun she'd twisted from it, she tilted her head back and stood up straight in the water. This new posture combined with the movement of the sea—from swelling wave to diminishing pull—left her exposed from her ribcage up each time the water retreated, and covered again to her shoulders each time the waves rolled back towards the sand once more. The preceding nights she'd been hyper-conscious of the water's movement, of keeping herself submerged. Now she stood directly in the moonlight, facing Han, unraveling her bun and then the long single braid slowly, unmoving even when the water fell again and again. Leia wasn't looking at him—she was suddenly, absurdly afraid of what she would see in his face if she watched him look at her. And so she closed her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair, letting it come loose to fall around her shoulders and land in the water.

Was he looking at her? She recalled with a new kind of pang how he'd turned away when she'd undressed, and while his chivalry had warmed her to her toes, she could only work up her nerve to show herself to him so many times before she lost her courage. What if she opened her eyes and found him once more studying the night sky? Leia didn't want to admit that she couldn't tell what was scarier: that she would find him looking at her, or that she would find him turned away.

The cool sea and light breeze had raised goosebumps over every centim of her skin. Chills both hot and cold shuddered down her back and through her limbs. That freeing sense of being outside of herself had vanished the instant she'd stood up in the water, and instead she was all too present in her body as her fingers trembled, as her heart pounded, and as her chest rose and fell with nervous breath. She felt the thrill of want and fear in her belly, a tremor in every part of her. The lapping of the water and the kiss of the humid air were tantalizing to the point of irritation on her over-sensitive skin—a tease that served only to crank the heat in her higher. As she finished pulling her hair out of the braid she was almost faint with the need for Han's touch in the place of the caressing wind. Han's mouth and tongue, instead of the waves, to lap at her breasts and at their aching peaks.

Then abruptly her hair was loose down her back, the ends already saturated with water, and Leia couldn't stand there with her eyes closed anymore. Rush in her ears drowning out the sounds of the crashing waves, Leia let her arms fall back to her sides, and opened her eyes.

 _Oh_.

Closing her eyes had been a mistake.

Han stood where he'd been before, a few feet away in the water. When she'd stood up it seemed so had he, water dancing around his navel and rolling in luminous droplets down his chest and arms. It was not the sight of his beautiful form, however, that dissolved her into flame. Leia had thought she'd seen desire on his face before. She'd thought she'd seen it when they'd locked eyes over the bacaonuts, and lying on the sand at night, and when he'd massaged the solarblock into her reddened skin. It was so suddenly clear to her however how wrong she'd been, for the tender hunger he'd tried to mask before was nothing compared to the expression he wore there before her in the sea.

Han looked anguished. Her abrupt recognition of this fact was Leia's undoing. If she'd had any reservation left when she'd taken her clothes off, it was scorched away now in the face of Han's want.

She didn't dare move—just stood there before him as he stared. Finally she found her voice.

"Han?"

He took another step closer. She watched him open his mouth and close it again. In the moonlight she could see the movement of his eyes over her face and hair and chest.

"You're killing me, Leia," he said hoarsely. She heard the huff of his exhaled breath. "What're we doing?"

Was she boiling the ocean water with this awful, slow burn?

"What do you think we're doing?" she asked.

She didn't know what she'd expected. Maybe some teasing retort? A big grin? Perhaps even an air of triumph. Instead Han's tortured expression seemed only to crease with greater conflict, and yet he stepped towards her again, until they stood almost chest to chest. She had to tilt her head back to look up at him, saw his face above her limned in moonlight and wreathed in stars. In the night his eyes were the same color as the turquoise sea.

Maybe it was his admission, the implications of his words—"You're killing me, Leia"—that affected her. The way he said it, like he was at her mercy. An unprecedented show of vulnerability and need that was like a balm to her ravaged soul. Oh, didn't he know that she was the one who was shipwrecked, that she was the one helplessly adrift here? She was drowning, in so far over her head. Maybe she was drunk on the island air and the salty sea and the lush breeze. Maybe it was the way he looked at her, like he was starving, that did it. Whatever it was, Leia was shocked into startling confidence. The sight of his undisguised want, the tormented temptation she saw as he looked at her. She felt like some siren standing before him in the water, alluring, beautiful, sexy, and powerful. She wanted to draw him down to her in the waves.

Just when she was about to reach for him, Han lifted his hand. With two fingers he slowly traced a wet strand of her hair, where it fell past her face and then stuck wetly to her chest. His eyes watched not his hand but her eyes, and Leia tried to convey all her yearning for him as she stared back. It almost hurt to so suddenly comprehend the effort she'd been exerting to deny this—how clear it was to her at last that this was the answer to the tumult that had plagued her for months. As Han touched her—asked permission of her—Leia could have wept from the relief. Wordlessly she grasped for his other hand in the water, and drew it not to her hair but to her flushed cheek.

She watched Han's torment melt into liberated emotion. He made a sound in his throat that ignited her like the stroke of a hundred matches as he cupped her face in his hands. Low in the core of herself and deep in her chest, Leia was throbbing.

She wanted to close her eyes against the sensation of his hands in her hair, but she couldn't bear to look away from his face again. She stood frozen, boneless. Was she swaying with the waves? Han's fingers brushed hair back from her face, tucked wet strands of it behind her ears and over her shoulders, and with every movement of his fingertips tingles danced over her scalp and down her back, and every stroke of his hands over her hair was punctuated by the maddening brush of his knuckles against her ocean-wet skin. The way he was looking at her—touching her... Leia couldn't believe it. So many expressions she'd come to love on Han's face. Boyish hope. Trademark smirk. Pride. Compassion. Gentle affection. Laughter. She even loved his anger, his sulk, his introspection. Restraint.

But Leia had never seen his face transformed with reverence. She had never before been the recipient of his undisguised adoration. The way he seemed undone just by touching her hair, just by tracing his thumb along her cheekbone and jaw, how his eyes seemed to rove over her with predatory hunger and tender yearning at once? She'd been anticipating his fervent ardor and impassioned lust, but she hadn't prepared for this evident rapture, this humble veneration. It made her eyes sting.

Then his touch left her hair and trailed down her arm. She almost moaned to feel his hand caress her at last. Leia reached for him—stood on her tiptoes in the plush sand. Han had leaned down as she'd stretched up, and she was breathing his breath and marveling at the sensation of his hot skin against hers beneath the water.

Their lips touched. Again. Again. Softly at first, better than she'd ever dreamed. Her imagination had been unable to conjure this. His full lips against hers, how soft they felt compared to the hardness of the rest of him. Leia opened her mouth, sought more of him. Pressed as closely as possible.

Han groaned.

The next thing she knew she was being swept up. Han bent in the water and hauled her up against him, large arms easily enveloping her. Leia gasped into their kiss as she wound her arms around his neck and wrapped her legs around his waist. He kissed her like he'd drunk from the bacaonuts: deeply, greedily. Like he'd been starving for her, like she was the only thing in the galaxy that could sate him. He tore his lips from hers to press searing kisses against her neck and throat and shoulder, and Leia shook to hear his lips shape the syllables of her name. It was like he was begging her, promising her, thanking her—thanking the galaxy _for_ her. Surrendering to her. And to hear in his voice that his emotion matched hers, that his vulnerability equaled her own, that he sounded as stunned and overwhelmed and grateful as she felt... Leia couldn't control the movement of her hands as they clutched his shoulders and arms, threaded through his hair, exulted in the smooth skin of his back. She couldn't stop touching him, kissing him—she was drunk on the taste and feel of him. When his teeth grazed her neck, she couldn't help the pleading whimper that escaped her. She couldn't help but nuzzle him back, kiss his jaw and the place where his neck and shoulder met. When Han began wading back towards the shore, carrying her through the water, Leia couldn't help but whisper, in a desperate voice that she'd never heard from herself before, that she wanted him.

Han's answer as he bore her down to the wet sand was whispered "Leia"s against her lips and cheeks and hair. If they were desperate for one another in the water, they were frantic together on the beach. The slide of Han's bare skin against her own, the rasp of his lips and the way he was touching her—it was so much Leia was dizzy. As she pulled him to her for another kiss, to revel again in his lips, in his breath, and in the sounds he made as she kissed him, she thought she must have been spinning out. His hands touching every part of her: tangling in her wet hair, gripping hip and thigh, caressing arm and ribcage and palming her aching breasts. Leia had thought before that she was losing her mind, but now there was no question that she was out of it completely. Out of her mind with need for him. In a rush Leia threw her legs around him again, shocked herself as she arched her back in the sand and ground against him.

Han's groan was ragged. He tightened his hold on her, but when she moved to kiss him again he drew back.

"Leia," he gasped, breathing fast. Leia was panting. Her chest was heaving. Around him she realized her arms were shaking.

Then Han reached for her hand where it lay against his cheek and turned his face to kiss her palm. This image somehow, more than anything else that had transpired, jolted her. More than the sight of him standing at the water's edge with his hands behind his head, averting his gaze to the night sky. More than how he'd looked in the water, face a picture of tormented want, when she'd undone her braid. More even than his reverent exploration of her hair and skin in the moonlight. Looking up at him above her, framed by the stars and by the two moons overhead, the unmistakable care in his eyes as he'd reached for her hand, the sight of her small fingers held by his, the tenderness of his kiss—his eyes squeezed shut as he kissed her palm.

Leia's eyes burned hot, and abruptly the ravenous energy left her. The heat lingered but the scalding rage of her desire was diminished, and Leia found herself naked on the beach, pressed to a naked Han from chest to hip, her legs still around him. Her uncontrollable lust from the ocean left her.

Han was studying her face.

"Are you alright?" he murmured, their fingers still entwined.

Leia couldn't speak again, but she nodded.

Han seemed to sense her abrupt shift in mood. She watched with her heart in her throat as he gazed down at her, sharp eyes roving over her.

"Do you—we don't have to do this," he whispered.

The thought of stopping was intolerable.

Leia shook her head. Her throat was tight with emotion. All she could think about were all the moments since their meeting that she'd wanted this so badly. How could she have finally let herself give in, and then back out at the last moment?

She squeezed his hand again—it seemed suddenly that it was the only thing keeping her from flying apart.

"I want to," she confessed. Or maybe it was a promise. She'd begun to feel absurd, lying there in the bright moonlight with her legs wrapped around him and his arousal pressing against her, and she'd begun to feel profoundly overwhelmed. The reality of the situation was returning—that before she'd waded into the sea with him, they'd barely even kissed. That she'd never done more than that with anyone.

Leia became acutely aware of her nakedness, and of how fast they'd gone, and of the tremble in her lips.

Han leaned his forehead against hers.

"Did I screw this up?" he asked, like he couldn't stand the thought. The same way he'd said, _"I hate that I was one of them, Sweetheart."_ Crushing regret.

The ache in her heart returned, more poignant even than before. Fiercely Leia wrapped her arms around him and pressed another kiss to his shoulder, pressed her face against his neck.

"No," she swore, shaking her head again. "No."

"I don't want," he breathed, into her neck, too, "to screw this up, sweetheart."

She couldn't help it.

"I love you."

If Leia could have clapped a hand against her mouth, she would have. She felt Han go as rigid in her arms as she knew she must have been in his. When Han drew back once more to look at her, it was the most intensely vulnerable moment of Leia's life. How did she end up there, naked, flat on her back on a desert island, with Han between her legs, and her premature confession of love for him hanging in the air between them? She was frozen—heat now entirely gone.

"What?"

Leia tried and failed to speak. She opened her mouth but could not, for the first time in her life, summon speech. In her chest her heart seemed to have been cloven in two. This was it, she knew. Naive girl. Han who fled from commitment, who shunned emotion and softness and anything that could be construed as weakness? Han who spoke daily about leaving the rebellion, about not wanting to be tied down? He would get up and leave her there, naked in the sand. Love, attachment, strings, importance? He'd just wanted to get between her legs at last, to finally resolve the unbearable sexual tension between them, and here she'd spoken of love?

' _No. Han who stayed from base to base, who held you as you cried, who's saved your life, who asked, as you jumped from flying ship into churning sea, if you trusted him._ '

Leia bit her lip. Implored herself to jump again.

"I love you," she breathed again, so softly that she feared he wouldn't hear.

But Han bowed his head and nodded, and she knew that he had. Her arms and legs around him were like a vice.

His breath brushed her ear.

"D'you have any idea," he asked quietly, "how long I've loved you, sweetheart?"

Leia squeezed her eyes closed.

"Don't," she begged. "Not because I said—"

"You think I'd say that just because you did?" he asked. He didn't sound angry—to the contrary, he sounded almost lazy. Like he was so assured by that, that he knew without question that _she_ knew without question the answer to what he'd asked.

And he was right. Leia knew without doubt that he would have never said those words to her if he hadn't meant them, trusted down to soul and bone that no matter how badly he might have wanted to sleep with her and no matter how cocky he could be, he would have never done anything to hurt her just then—would have never inflicted that kind of wound. Deception. Advantage. It wasn't true of him.

But then that meant that he was in love with her.

Han must have seen that knowledge in her face, because he kissed her again. These kisses were different than the ones that had come before. Their lips together, their hearts beating against one another's. Their hands no longer groped. Han cradled her face and kissed her closed eyelids and her cheeks and her forehead. Deliverance.

Leia let her legs fall from around his waist and they rolled to their sides, still caressing like they couldn't believe the preciousness of the other, and it was only when she heard that Han was speaking to her that she realized that she'd been speaking to him.

Words like breathing, insistence. "I love you, I love you, Han, I love you..."

Again and again against his lips and his neck and his shoulders. And he answered.

"I know, I know Leia, I love you, I know..."

The water was lapping at their feet, and Leia had gotten cold in the breeze and with the sudden onslaught of nerves—from the shock of the flames having been so suddenly doused—but Han was holding her against his warmth and his lips were branding her skin and he was breathing fire into her again.

"What do you want, princess?" he asked, when their kisses lingered and deepened again, when she was clutching him to herself with such desperation she thought she'd break from it. "What do you want to do?"

Leia wanted to say that she wanted to do _him_. That she wanted to have sex on the beach, make love in the moonlight. But Leia couldn't speak. Instead she caught his gaze in the starlight, felt the burn again as she tentatively trailed her fingers over his heart, along his abdomen. Lower still.

Han hissed between his teeth and rolled her back to her back. Grit sweet assurance as he joined her in the fire once more. His hands came back upon her, stroking, sparking—stoking her flames and lighting her up. Leia was reduced to whimpers and moans as they came together on the beach, the rolling water powerless against their climbing conflagration. And as they writhed on the shore, lips searing skin, hands scorching and enflaming, speaking ardent truth into the hot night, Leia laid herself completely on the pyre. Heedless now of worry or consequence, secure and reckless in mutual confession, she surrendered at long last to the heat.


End file.
